Sunlight Foundation Offers Open Data Road Map

The Sunlight Foundation’s project is called Roadmap to Informed Communities, and it’s essentially a procedural framework aimed at helping cities create open data programs that incorporate constituent feedback.

The Sunlight Foundation rolled out a new project this week called Roadmap to Informed Communities, which is a toolset aimed at helping local governments with open data work tailored to their residents.

The Roadmap to Informed Communities, at a base level, is a four-step framework that includes action, result, engagement and collaborators. Within this framework, the Sunlight Foundation’s new tools seek to help local government accomplish something called Tactical Data Engagement, which includes granular work like problem-scoping and subsequently designing research-based solutions after collecting information from the community.

These tools are almost philosophical in nature, meant to teach public agencies an iterative process they can apply in perpetuity as their data work evolves. Incorporating more community feedback into open data work is a priority taking hold in municipal governments nationwide. Whereas once the emphasis was on simply releasing as much data as feasible, public servants are now taking a more thoughtful approach. The aim has become to not only release data but to do so in ways that spur public engagement and benefit from the data.

Sunlight Foundation also notes that its new road map features tools that can help cities achieve What Works Cities certification, one of the foremost benchmarks in the gov tech space for citizen-service efforts.